Finding Newark Schools' Millions

If only there was as much critical conversation about the effectiveness of the many generous grants made to our public schools by a multitude of philanthropic foundations, including Face­book founder Mark Zuckerberg’s Startup Foundation, which has pledged $100 million in matching funds to the FNF to help Newark schools.

But such conversation remains difficult, in part, because we still don’t have a reliable way to measure the effectiveness of the city’s education philanthropy.

The Newark Trust for Education wants to change that. Through our own sifting of available — but uncoordinated — information, we now know that more than $95 million from 50 private funders are supporting hundreds of programs in Newark’s 94 public charter and district schools. Unfortunately, a survey of school principals conducted last year also indicates that nearly half of these programs are clustered in just eight schools.